RSS

How-To Geek

Printer ink is expensive, more expensive per drop than fine champagne or even human blood. If you haven’t gone paperless, you’ll notice that you’re paying a lot for new ink cartridges — more than seems reasonable.

Purchasing the cheapest inkjet printer and buying official ink cartridge replacements is the most expensive thing you can do. There are ways to save money on ink if you must continue to print documents.

Cheap Printers, Expensive Ink

Ink jet printers are often very cheap. That’s because they’re sold at cost, or even at a loss — the manufacturer either makes no profit from the printer itself or loses money.

The manufacturer will make most of its money from the printer cartridges you buy later. Even if the company does make a bit of money from each printer sold, it makes a much larger profit margin on ink. Rather than selling you a printer that may be rather expensive, they want to sell you a cheap printer and make money on an ongoing basis by providing expensive printer ink.

It’s been compared to the razor model — sell a razor cheaply and mark up the razor blades. Rather than making a one-time profit on the razor, you’ll make continuing profit as the customer keeps buying razor blade replacements — or ink, in this case.

Many printer manufacturers go out of their way to make it difficult for you to use unofficial ink cartridges, building microchips into their official ink cartridges. If you use an unofficial cartridge or refill an official cartridge, the printer may refuse to use it. Lexmark once argued in court that unofficial microchips that enable third-party ink cartridges would violate their copyright and Lexmark has argued that creating an unofficial microchip to bypass this restriction on third-party ink would violate Lexmark’s copyright and be illegal under the US DMCA. Luckily, they lost this argument.

What Printer Companies Say

Printer companies have put forth their own arguments in the past, attempting to justify the high cost of official ink cartridges and microchips that block any competition.

In a Computer World story from 2010, HP argued that they spend a billion dollars each year on “ink research and development.” They point out that printer ink “must be formulated to withstand heating to 300 degrees, vaporization, and being squirted at 30 miles per hour, at a rate of 36,000 drops per second, through a nozzle one third the size of a human hair. After all that it must dry almost instantly on the paper.” They also argue that printers have become more efficient and use less ink to print, while third-party cartridges are less reliable.

Companies that use microchips in their ink cartridges argue that only the microchip has the ability to enforce an expiration date, preventing consumers from using old ink cartridges.

There’s something to all these arguments, sure — but they don’t seem to justify the sky-high cost of printer ink or the restriction on using third-party or refilled cartridges.

Saving Money on Printing

Ultimately, the price of something is what people are willing to pay and printer companies have found that most consumers are willing to pay this much for ink cartridge replacements. Try not to fall for it: Don’t buy the cheapest inkjet printer. Consider your needs when buying a printer and do some research. You’ll save more money in the long run.

Consider these basic tips to save money on printing:

Buy Refilled Cartridges: Refilled cartridges from third parties are generally much cheaper. Printer companies warn us away from these, but they often work very well.

Refill Your Own Cartridges: You can get do-it-yourself kits for refilling your own printer ink cartridges, but this can be messy. Your printer may refuse to accept a refilled cartridge if the cartridge contains a microchip.

Switch to a Laser Printer: Laser printers use toner, not ink cartridges. If you print a lot of black and white documents, a laser printer can be cheaper.

Buy XL Cartridges: If you are buying official printer ink cartridges, spend more money each time. The cheapest ink cartridges won’t contain much ink at all, while larger “XL” ink cartridges will contain much more ink for only a bit more money. It’s often cheaper to buy in bulk.

Avoid Printers With Tri-Color Ink Cartridges: If you’re printing color documents, you’ll want to get a printer that uses separate ink cartridges for all its colors. For example, let’s say your printer has a “Color” cartridge that contains blue, green, and red ink. If you print a lot of blue documents and use up all your blue ink, the Color cartridge will refuse to function — now all you can do is throw away your cartridge and buy a new one, even if the green and red ink chambers are full. If you had a printer with separate color cartridges, you’d just have to replace the blue cartridge.

If you’ll be buying official ink cartridges, be sure to compare the cost of cartridges when buying a printer. The cheapest printer may be more expensive in the long run.

You shouldn't do that @theMike . Just buy a good printer and refills from a shop.The ink that comes with a new printer is usually 1/4 to 1/5th of a regular cartridge. Normally a cartridge from HP will be 3ml, a XL will be 6ml, and a trial is 0.5ml. Get your refills from a third-arty 'printer-ink' selling shop. They will refill and give out new cartridges that work for far cheaper. Now, I normally get 15ml cartridges for my HP printer at a third of the price... getting refills is cheaper still.

I'd like to add: Wax "inks" or color blocks, synonymous with Xerox's ColorCube line of printers, also falls under this category. The blocks are formed to be "keyed" to only fit specific models of the printer, and the sets range from $300-$500US. They're litterally block-shaped crayons! Well, maybe a little harder than crayons, but colored wax none-the-less.

While the print quality is amazing, I'm stuck buying from the OEM as aftermarket is almost nonexistent (unless I import from HK. No thanks.).

When I need a new printer I shop around and create a short list. From the short list I search for the available of 3rd party ink cartridges thru a creditable seller like Amazon. Printers with no 3rd party cartridges come of the list.

My last printer a Brother for $49. I purchased 10 3rd party LC61 ink cartridges for less than $15. I've been using them for over a year without an ink problem.

I will NOT pay twice the cost of the printer for ink refills. If push come to shove I'll throw away the $49 and buy a new one. But I've never had to do that.

I've known about the Lexmark cartridges for years and that is why Lexmark was not or every be on my short list. $25 for an ink cartridge is out and out robbery.

I've owned one inkjet...never, EVER again! My printing demand is irregular; I might print one document, go a week or two before printing another one, then two or three weeks later, print the equivalent of a small novel. The nozzles in the inkjet I had (an Epson, btw) would clog in a little as a week of disuse and required massive amounts of ink to clean.

A good laser printer isn't cheap and is bulky but is by far much more cost effective, especially if one prints infrequently. I will never own anything but laser printers. Laser printers don't make as good photo prints as inkjests (misspelling deliberate) but those can be farmed out. The tone cartridges for lasers aren't cheap but the cost of use per page is much cheaper than for inkjets.

Of course, going paperless is the most cost effective whenever that is practical (I've done that to a large degree). However, one thing that will save money that the article doesn't mention is farming out your printing to a print or copy shop. If you have only an occasional need for color prints, such as photos, etc. it is much less expensive to just get a B&W laser jet and farm out any color print jobs to a copy or print shop. I have a color laser that cost me an arm and a leg (and a few other body parts I shan't mention) but I got it for the convenience of always being able to print at home on demand even though I rarely use color.

Also, color laser is coming down in price. When we got our new printer, we wanted scanner (so we could use it as a copier) networked, and color. Unfortunately, we could only find any two (not all three) without the price doubling. We ended up getting a black and white laser. I was going to start up my old inkjet and plug it in via USB any time color was needed, but with the chance of the ink being dried up each time, farming that out is much smarter. Thank you.

BTW, the laser is a Brother MFC-7460DN, and not only does it work fine with Windows, but the built in print server very closely resembles CUPS (it may even be CUPS) so Mac and Linux support is a breeze too. The Linux scan drivers work better than the Windows ones, but other than that, it has been good cross platform.

You are correct about color lasers coming down in price. I paid very little more for my color laser than I did for the B&W it replaced (I run my hardware as long as I can).

I always recommend that people stay away from the so called three in ones (actually, they are two in ones used three ways) unless space is a serious problem. One problem with the integrated units is, if one portion fails, you generally have to replace the whole thing, including the part that still works (it's rarely cost effective to take one in for repair). Another problem with them is they tend to be poorer quality than discrete components; that's one reason they are cheaper. They usually don't have as many features as discrete components do.

I have a color laser, a high speed ADF (Automatic Document Feed) Duplexing scanner I use for most of my scanning needs (I love that machine!) and a flat bed scanner I use for scanning jobs the ADF is not suitable for, such as thick originals, fragile documents, or extremely high resolution scans. Although I rarely do so, I can operate all three simultaneously, an advantage more suited to a multi-person office setting. If any one unit goes down, I can still use the other two until I can repair or replace the down machine.

Actually, one way to save on ink is to always keep your printer on. I am not kidding. This depends on your specific printer brand, and how often you print, of course, but according to a computer magazine (forgot which one), the start-up procedure of some ink printers consumes a lot of ink, performing some kind of cleaning or aligning printer heads, or whatnot. At least my Canon multiprinter uses up a lot of ink in the startup-procedure. According to the calculations in the magazine, the power consumption cost of keeping the printer always-on was very small compared to the wasted ink cost. The printer will go into stand-by mode (hopefully) and reduce the power consumption substantially.

I got tired of the printer ink costs years ago. I purchased a Canon Imageclass MF4150 series laser printer over 5 years ago and it is still going strong. I get a 2-pack of laser cartidges from Amazon for less then $40 and I'm good to go for about a year, sometimes longer.

Does your Brother actually print on both sides automatically or do you have to feed the first side printouts back into the machine to print the second side? That's what I have to do with my Samsung CLP 415NW.

Most laser printer toner carts are expensive but, when you break down the cost to per page, they are far more economical than inkjets, and that's without factoring the wasted ink from cleaning the heads. There are occasional exceptions, however. The IT department decided to standardize all printers with Lexmarks. They came unexpectedly one day and took the HP LaserJet 4 I had just put a new cart into and replaced with a Lexmark that had a starter cart in it, which started running low almost right away. I was shocked to find out how much a new cart cost when I ordered one. One piece of advice I now give to people shopping for printers (and some other hardware) is to calculate the cost of consumables per page.

you’ll notice that you’re paying a lot for new ink cartridges — more than seems reasonable

.. and it doesn't stop there, since the manufacturers are doing their absolute best to try and make refilling the cartridges not possible: by placing chips on the cartridges themselves and making seals fragile so that they will break after a certain number of refills (ideally for them, no refills should be possible; so that we will be forced to pay for their ultra-expensive cartridges); why is this lunacy possible and how this craziness came to be are certainly good questions, but what we really need to ask ourselves is:

WHERE ARE the (good ol') RIBBON printers?!?? Hundreds (and thousands!) of pages can be printed using just 1 (one) cheap ink-ribbon; cheap to buy, cheap to replace. THIS is what WE (all) NEED!..:-)

Edit: I've not purposefully provided wrong information here; if there is something in my text that isn't accurate: please do provide the corrections, thank you!! =)

Then the old ribbon type printers would have been perfect for you. Most people need or prefer more speed and better quality (I'm not putting you down; different people have different needs) and the printer manufacturers go where the most profit is to be had. Pity they can't settle for that and not try to gouge us.

As for me (and I don't consider myself to be a typical user), I print maps, sometimes in color, charts, illustrated chapbooks, sheet music, shopping lists and cheat sheets on 3x5 cards, checks, envelopes, etc. and prefer not to die of old age waiting for the print job to run (at my age, the latter is a huge concern).

I installed a CISS (Continous Ink Supply System) 5 years ago in a HP Printer, and it still works!! Never had a problem about clogging injectors, and in the case it'll happen in the future, I can just buy new cartridges that have on them new injectors. I buy the ink in bulk through ebay, and you can have 4 bottles for less than 20$ that lasts more than one year with normal printing (several pages per week). The only drawback is that the ink is water based, so if you print something and drop water over it, instantly will be destroyed

Actually, buying a lot of cartridges in advance is a bad idea because they could expire while setting in storage. Laser toners can fuse inside the cartridge over time unless kept in a cool, dry place (I live in a desert; dry? yes, cool? LOL!).

Lady F, can you not use the "properties" box beside the Name of your printer in the print dialogue box? I have a Brother laser printer, and can click that box, then select "duplex" on the basic settings on the next screen.

My biggest complaint with inkjets printers is the cleaning software that exercises (wastes) ink from all cartridges even though only one color is not functioning properly. I don't want to use up all my color ink trying to get my black ink unclogged, but the manufactures have not considered that possibility.

Actually, there is a little truth to all of the above discussion. I have been selling printers for over 18+ years at an Office Supply store and have taken lots of training and real world experiences. I tend to favor HP printers due to the fact that they are by far the most popular brand of printer we sell and Canon, Epson, and Brother printers all share an incredible high rate of returns from customers - MUCH more than the HP printers we sell.

That said, there is still some good advice here - DON'T buy a cheap printer! The cheaper the printer, the more you will pay in ink over the long run, especially at cost per page.

Until recently, laser printers were THE way to go affording the cheapest cost per page as well as quality. Do some research though, and the newer crop of printers, especially newer ones like the HP OfficeJet 8600 series and the newly released OfficeJet ProX, are much more affordable and indeed (again, from real world experience) cost half of what laser printing cost.

Spend a little more to get a decent ink jet printer. Follow the advice to always keep it on (to reduce clogged ink jets). If you do any kind of moderate to heavy printing, you will definitely save a lot of $$ spend on ink and toner.

Another reason I like the OfficeJet series - HP doesn't scrimp on "starter" cartridges. They come with a "setup" cartridge which is actually has a little more ink than a typical cartridge does - there is enough ink to "prime" the system for first time use, then you have the regular amount of yield you would get out of a regular cartridge.

One aspect of the article that I do not espouse though is buying third party ink. This may be fine for producing everyday reports and such, but for quality and long-lasting printing (especially color), I have to side on the manufacturer's side (Epson and HP) in that their inks are formulated for consistency, long-lasting, clean printing, and durability. On my HP OfficeJet - I can spray water on the paper as soon as I take it off the printer and it will NOT run. But, they have indeed spent $$$ on ink research and continue to do so.

I may sound like an HP representative here, but I am not employed by any printer manufacturers, just one who has sold thousands of these and keeps up with quality and feedback from customers on their use.

GEEK TRIVIA

DID YOU KNOW?

The practice of placing perfume counters close to the front of department stores started with department store pioneer Harry Selfridge; he placed the counter at the front to better entice customers into buying perfume and it had the added benefit of masking the smell of manure and exhaust coming in from the street.